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I whole-heartedly agree with Mona on that last statement. I do hope that there will be more stories of these guys in the future, but for now it’s been really quiet on all fronts (including mine) so I guess that this might be it. Well, let’s not say that this is the end, for I don’t want that. Let’s just say the comic is on hiatus. There are still a few more stories to be written, I know Kenny has a few on the shelf and God knows I’ve got some. I wish I could continue drawing, even if it has been hell only this one year I’ve been working, but I cannot for personal reasons that I believe everyone who should know about knows about.

About the comic? Yeah, it might seem to be the lazy way out, I was hoping for a feeling of reminiscence. Though I don’t know if I did a good job at that or not. In either case it sorta shows how much I’ve improved over this one and only year. Go back further and check out Silvers progress, that’s just amazing!

I feel like I should say something more, but I don’t really have anything more to say. Been fun, and now of to the next project! Be great, everyone!

So many moons ago I made an April Fools’ joke about making a Next Era game. It wasn’t actually a game, but it was a custom StarCraft map that I was working on. It was never completed. But now that StarCraft and Brood War have been made freeware, I was reminded of it.

Honestly, though, it’s not really in a playable state. It’s literally not playable in version 1.18, as in it won’t even start. I think you can run it in 1.16, and you can do some things, but it’s not completeable. It can at least be opened with ScmDraft.

And, at least, here’s some screenshots from the editor, showing off parts of it.

The starting point. It should be kind of obvious who is who of our heroes, but for reference: Fenix (Zealot) is of course 666, speedy humanoid with claws. Sarah Kerrigan (Ghost) is Silver with her sniper rifle. Guy Montag (Firebat) is Snex fairly good fit. Infested Kerrigan is Shiva, mostly because she’s kind of the only other female hero unit, but it’s not a terrible fit – would have been perfect if I could give the electric storm special to Silver, though. Fenix (Dragoon) is Metro, with the plasma. And finally, Devouring One (Zergling) is Type, also speedy and somewhat less humanoid than 666.

The entrance to the, well, fortress.

Flame Mammoth’s stage, mostly. The Zerg beacon, usually located after a boss fight, is consistently used as an “explosion pad”, that will destroy the nearby barracks – aka blockades, thereby granting access to the power generator. Eight in total and they all need to be destroyed.

Boss battle with Flame Mammoth, the Siege Tank. Starting out in deployed mode, when that one is defeated he would become the regular tank and drive around the pit. Didn’t have anything in place yet to make sure he could be defeated without ranged units.

Supposedly Crescent Grizzly’s stage, and sort of boss fight – he’s the Ultralisk. Was supposed to run down the corridor and meet the heroes at some point. Stage was never populated with enemies.

Cyber Peacock’s stage. Protoss beacons are teleporters.

Boss battle with Cyber Peacock, the Arbiter. If I recall correctly, touching the Terran beacon underneath him would turn control of the missile towers in the boss arena over to the player for a time (which I believe was through Pallette hacking into the systems), thus being able to see what he had cloaked and also attack him.

Sting Chameleon’s stage, most of it at least (and the editor doesn’t show the creep). Most of the colonies are invincible, so the ones that weren’t had to be destroyed to proceed. Burrowed Zerg units everywhere.

Dark Mantis the Dark Templar, who didn’t have a stage or boss arena built yet.

Morph Moth the Guardian, but I’m pretty sure he was supposed to start out in cocoon form. Also didn’t have a stage or boss arena built

The final stage, leading up to the final battle.

The final corridor. The Photon Cannons are invincible and hits super hard, so heading in here without first disabling them would get you killed. The way to proceed was to defeat the bosses and destroy the eight power generators – each one was linked to a Pylon, so when the generator was destroyed, so was the Pylon. Destroying all eight thus meant no power to the cannons. Nothing was really done past the final corridor, but past those doors, the players would have the final boss fight with Sigma, of course in two forms – first form being Tassadar as High Templar, second form being an Archon. And beating that would win the map.

And, well, there’s the minimap in the editor. That’s about it.

In other news some time ago I tried to update the wiki. Something went really fuckin’ wrong with that, and as a result, the wiki is currently unavailable. I may try to get it back up again at some point in the future when I have the time.

I’ll just finish up here with some shameless self-promotion, ’cause while Next Era is pretty much asleep, I haven’t stopped writing. Almost exactly eleven months ago – on May 14th, my birthday, 2016, I officially launched One Piece: Pure Corruption, a, well, One Piece fanfiction. It’s got 33 chapters published so far, and is currently updating roughly every other Friday. So if you liked my Next Era writings, well, you can check that out.

And finally, I may have a little Next Era-related surprise boiling. No promises, though!

I keep thinking of new things to mention. But today’s a short one. I randomly thought of it, and realized I don’t think it was ever “revealed”.

Nothing big – just the location of the Maverickhunters Headquarters.

I don’t know where people have thought it was, and I don’t remember how much of it was mentioned in the stories, but given that we’re basing this on originally Japanese games, people could be forgiven for thinking it was in Japan. But we decided at some point that it actually was located in North America, and there is at least a mention of that on the wiki. Specifically – in California. And that the closest remaining city was Los Angeles. Basically, we figured that big cities would be the ones most likely to still stand after the wars, and I can very much imagine they even grew, as people clustered together in greater amounts and people from smaller communities moved to bigger cities, and after the war they expanded. At least the draft of Tribute mentions “the city” – which is supposed to mean Los Angeles. Anyway.

At some point, I found a place on some map serive. I don’t think it was Google Maps at that time. It was some kind of space communications center. I considered for a little while that to be the location of the HQ, but eventually I looked around even more, and what did I find?

Another thing we had stated at some point is that the HQ was likely on the site of a former army base. And here we had one, in the area we had said HQ was, close to the spot I first had considered (okay, so it’s a training facility rather than a straight up base, but, y’know. The Hunters did a lot of remodeling anyway). I still considered the first location kind of a part of HQ – it was one of multiple facilities in the area they made use of, even if that one eventually fell into disuse and became entrely automated – it’s where Metro gets sent in Symphony, by the way. While it originally was the DSS-15 I found, there’s at least two other places – DSS-12 and Apollo – that are in the same area, in the same general direction and at enough of a distance that any of them could fit the bill, and they’re probably all used by the Hunters if they were still standing after the war. Basically, any sort of installation in the area that didn’t get destroyed in the Maverick Wars were likely at some point reclaimed by the Hunters.

My main problem with this was that I in Symphony needed a forest close enough for Bamboo Pandamonium to launch his missiles from. I eventually just figured that a forest could have been grown in the vicinity between “now” and then.

It should be no secret nor come as a surprise to anyone that I consider myself a musically inclined person. From participating in miming performances in school, to being in the school choir, to having had a period in my life where I played drums, to these days having karaoke as one of my primary hobbies. I listen to music pretty much all the time too.

So it should come as no real surprise that I have, at times, applied music to Next Era. Even if none of that ever actually became visible in the writings.

At the bottom of the Symphony document, you can see that I had started considering a “soundtrack” for it. It had 12 spots, because at the time, there was a website called Muxtape where you could make a mixtape with 12 songs (and now I find that someone has made an open source package for doing a similar thing on your own website. I have downloaded this and will look into it). I was planning on making one and linking to it when the story was posted. Each track would pertain to a specific scene, or collection of scenes, in the story. And get its own title. So let’s start there. I only wrote down four, though.

First, Unseen bonds – the decisive battles of three comrades. This was, I’m pretty sure, going to be for Silver’s, Shiva’s and 666’s fights, as I think they’re kind of done at the same time in the story. The song is Brave Heart by Megumi Hayashibara, from Shaman King. It fits for cutting between three frantic battle scenes, I guess? Even if the story, as written, doesn’t have those cuts. I probably tended to think more “cinematically” for what the soundtrack would be.

True colours – a fearless sacrifice is… well, I’m fairly certain it was for when Kay sacrificed herself to take down Lumine, since “true colours” refers to that also being the major scene where Lumine is revealed as the villain of the piece. Problem with that is that the reveal and the sacrifice were to be in two different scenes. Thing is? I have no idea what song was meant for this. I probably never thought of one.

The sisters’ requiem – let’s meet again in the afterlife is, well, when Jay is being a bit sad about Kay’s death. Atos cheers her up, he can probably relate since he’s effectively lost his dad. The song is Over the Distance by Hitomi Yaida, made famous (and introduced to me) through manly DS rhythm game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan.

That which was lost – turning eyes toward tomorrow would have been the finale. When all the enemies have been defeated, when the attack on the HQ has been stopped. When there’s actually time to mourn all the lives that were lost in the attack and start taking the next step… rebuilding. It’s actually two songs – This Land and King of Pride Rock, both from the best Disney movie ever, and I shouldn’t even have to say the name. The songs are fantastic mixes of melancholy and triumph. The segment of Circle of Life at the end of the latter one isn’t quite fitting, but…

I’m not actually sure if I had any more songs actually figured out for that, but that’s four out of 12… there would have been 8 more. I guess these would have been, in some kind of order, the introduction, the start of the attack, 666 and Shiva’s reappearance, Vile vs. Pandamonium, Metro vs. Man-o-war, Silver (and Pallette) reconnecting with Shiva, Blues dying and 666 fighting Hailius. Actually, no, scratch that, that would be a bonus track since it takes place three days later, after the “finale”. I guess that would be the “stinger” that plays after the credits. So the 12th scene with a track would be… either the one where 666 meets up with Snex, or giving Kay another track – one for the Lumine battle, and one for the sacrifice. W/e.

But that obviously wasn’t all. I had some ideas for other songs going, at one point I had an idea to give each character a soundtrack, and well… I remember, hilariously enough, that the track for 666 getting together with Razie was going to be, of all things, Strangers in the Night. Bascially, if you take the “dance” part of the lyrics and interpret it as “fight” (because that’s what they actually DID the night of the first day they met), it’s actually pretty fitting. “Love was just a glance away, a warm embracing dance away.” Followed by “in love forever”. It makes sense in fairly silly ways. I also knew I wanted to use, for obvious reasons, Get up 2 the Track (666 is back) for something. I think “comeback” was the only idea there, but it wouldn’t have fit for when he returned in Symphony, really… and sadly, I don’t remember any more songs planned for any characters.

Which brings me to my third and final part of this… Next Era-specific songs. Rather than take an already existing song and apply it to Next Era, get some actual Next Era songs. Partly, at least. Inspired by writing translations or parodies in Swedish of various songs, mostly Japanese (bunch of my work can be found here), I started thinking of Next Era songs. Which didn’t really get that far either. Two ideas were had – a Next Era “intro song” (I often thought of NE in terms of being a kind of animated series), which would be English lyrics using the music of Yeah! Break! Care! Break! from Dragon Ball Kai, and a sad song that would be sung by/from the perspective of Shiva (image song!) about how she’s had kind of a fucked up life but have to go on anyway, to the music of Naraku no Hana from When They Cry.

I think that’s all I have to say about that. If I randomly remember more things, there might be more posts in the future.

It’s a thing I’ve come to realize. Endings of things is a thing I want to attain.

Endings of video games. Endings of books. Endings of stories that I write.

Next Era never actually had an ending. That’s because it was never a continuous, chronological story.

Maybe that’s a thing that bothered me with it. Maybe that’s why I started getting ideas for endings of things – for instance, deaths of characters. And I had started on a story that would be if not the ending of all of the Next Era storyline, at least an ending that would change things a lot. Well, it was actually a series of stories around the same event, under the collective header of Fortress. Anyway.

There’s a new story up. It’s a story that was mostly written quite a while ago, started shortly after Archives was completed, and is in fact the companion piece to it. Archives should be read first, as the point of this one is to provide a bit of backstory to it.

This story is special for many reasons. First, it is highly likely to be the last Next Era story ever published. At the same time, it’s chronologically the earliest. In fact, it doesn’t even feature any of our own characters. It could be a standalone Mega Man fanfic, if not for the connection to Archives.

It’s not an ending, but I’ve done a kind of ending. (The actual final line of the story is there only for that reason, really, and isn’t a line I would have used if this wasn’t the final story to be published.) It’s a book ending. There’s a line in this story that directly references – and fuck knows why I even remembered it – a very old piece of Mega Man fanart drawn by Silver that existed even before Next Era was a thing, so it has now retroactively become a piece of Next Era fanart.

That’s the kind of endings I like. And that, plus the last line of the story, is why the title of this blog post is what it is.

I had plans for Next Era, sure. I had a lot of story ideas brewing in my head. Or character ideas. And if this is the last part, I’m just going to type out a bunch of those plans, character for character.

666

Obviously, starting with my main guy. You know, I started having a few issues with 666 as time went on. It’s not a coincidence that I started shifting focus to Shiva a bit towards the end, because she was a much more interesting character to write for. Apart from his part in Fortress, I had two stories cooking – Wolf and Cigarettes – that were supposed to essentially conclude 666’s character arc. Cigarettes has some disjoined parts written out, Wolf has about two lines. Cigarettes picked up from something called Student, the idea of which was 666 becoming Morgan Lock’s teacher in close combat. Cigarettes would also be the story where 666 finally got rid of that fucking forehead protector. I liked it originally, but later on it just became stupid. For future stories, the idea was going to live on in the form of a plain white headband.

Wolf is perhaps the more interesting one, really, because it would be the story that finally told the tale of 666’s creation. The biggest reveal it would come with? 666’s real name. A name that he himself never actually knew. He was supposed to have the name of the body that was the basis of his design from the chimaera project, even if there were parts from a bunch of others used as well. So, here it is, once and for all: 666 was supposed to be Moro, the wolf. Moro was also originally meant to be a female chimaera. Not that it would have done a lot of difference in anything but the voice. So did 666/Moro kill his/her creators? Well – yes. That was never much of a secret, really. But he (I’ll just stick to that) wasn’t actually completed at that time. What actually happened, we’ll never know.

He was going to have a fight with Renilo. That was an old idea but I liked it.

And then there’s the matter of how I planned for 666 to die. For die he was going to do. In Fortress. The last or second-to-last story in the Fortress “anthology”, a chapter titled Promise. 666 fights Sigma, a battle he hadn’t been designated to. It was supposed to be Signas’s battle, but 666 intercepted it, thinking that it was more important for Signas to survive than him – and if he failed, he would at least weaken Sigma for Signas to finish it. Signas never actually got to do anything, as 666 literally took Sigma with him in death.

Shiva & Pallette

I pretty much can’t write on one of these without including the other since almost everything I had planned for them involved them as a couple. Though I didn’t actually have anything immediate planned for either of them, there were plans. Most of them picking up post-Fortress, though. Shiva’s Fortress chapter was to be shared with Silver, named Bonds and they were going to face Split Mushroom, who in Next Era was to be one of the few still active mavericks directly affiliated with Sigma and far, far more dangerous than he was in Mega Man X4. With a pretty satisfying final blow.

Shiva was going to lose an arm in Symphony. She never had it replaced, at least not with an arm. There was going to be something in its place.

Shiva and Pallette were going to get married eventually, not entirely sure if that was going to happen before or after Fortress. A thing that was going to happen after Fortress, though, was them having a daughter through science, essentially impregnating Shiva with sperm cells created from Pallette’s DNA. A daughter with the name of Alia Maria Lucia, “Maria” being the primary name here. No family name – Shiva and Pallette never had one. Shiva technically has one but refuses to use it.

Shiva was also going to die. I’m not sure how, but it was going to be when Maria was only 5-6 years old.

Pallette was going to die as well (I don’t know what it’s with me and killing off characters), but she was going to be a character who got to die of “old age”, as much as that applies to robots. In Pallette’s case, it had to do with a built-in expiry date, something Lifesavor managed to prolong so that she at least didn’t pass until Maria was into her teenage years. I actually started writing the story of this, titled Expiry. It has disjoined parts of a draft.

And for some reason, just a bunch of days ago (okay, so the reason involved reading through some Let’s Plays of the Mega Man Battle Network games), I decided that Pallette’s internet nick is/was π♀. Because she’s a nerd, you see. (and since she also was a net navi enthusiast, a thing that in the time of Next Era is a very, very retro thing – think, in terms of technology, playing video games from the early 80’s – the navi she had programmed for herself was pretty much a recreation of NumberMan.exe)

Okay, now we’re going into characters who aren’t actually mine. I didn’t have as many plans for them. But still plans. Of course, any time I say that I planned how they were going to die, it was only my own ideas, and not necessarily the way it was going to happen in the end.

Silver

So, the main character! You could argue that our primary characters were supposed to be of equal importance but let’s face it, if there’s one character who deserves to be called the main character of Next Era, it’s Silver. She’s the focal point for most of our dudes and dudettes. She’s Snex’s wife, she recruited 666 to the hunters, she’s the creation of Raines.

But, really, I didn’t plan on doing much with her. As mentioned, her Fortress chapter was a double billing with Shiva. She was also going to lose an arm (nearly sacrificing herself, really) in Symphony, but had it replaced. She lost Longinus in the process, but eventually made a Longinus v2 out of half of Artemis. Yes, Gary’s sword. I’ll get to that, but it has to do with a fight with Haigos, a fight involving Silver and the Xenox brothers (also more on them later). Gary was thought dead after that battle, half of Artemis had been destroyed and Silver used the other half for the final blow and later modified it. Gary survived, though. You don’t kill a Xenox that easily.

She was going to die, eventually, like everyone else. I think my idea was that she was going to fry her own brain to prevent Melissa from taking over. But that would not occur for quite a while. Snex was at least going to outlive her, and it would be the second to last death of all deaths listed in this post. She was going to stay an Admiral for the rest of her time with the Hunters – which probably was going to be for the rest of her life.

Snex

Okay. So. Snex.

Snex is interesting. Just from the fact that Lief didn’t include him (or 666) in Whisper, I made a plot point of that he had vanished from the Hunters at one point. He was to do a short guest appearance in Symphony, revealing that 666 knew what he was up to, because 666 wasn’t part of the hunters and they were never close friends. He was eventually going to return to the Hunters, revealing that he had done… something… that was of great importance. It would be before Fortress, at least, perhaps even related to Fortress. Due to his abscence, he wasn’t a General anymore when he came back, but he had improved in several aspects while gone and managed to make it all the way up to becoming one of the ten Field Marshals, the second highest rank in the Hunters (with only the Grand Marshal, Signas, standing above).

I never figured out any death for him. Post-timeskip, so to speak, Snex became a too awesome character in my head for that. His chapter of Fortress was to be named Servant and he was going to fight Vile in what was supposed to basically be Snex’s awesomest fight in all of Next Era.

Atos

Atos, oh Atos. Atos (and Maria) was going to basically be the person in the frontlines of life after Next Era, so to speak. But I didn’t actually have a lot of plans for him. There was a thing where 666 had spent a bunch of time with him, with his final lesson delivered posthumously being to ensure that Atos was never going to become like him.

For an imagined sequel series to Next Era I imagined up a great-grandson for him, though. But there’s a document on that.

Raines

The vampires were iffy to plan for. Raines, well… I never really used him in anything. But long-term plans are long-term plans. He was involved in the fight against Haigos as well, and came out of it alive.

There was a death planned for him. It had to do with his half-vampire body basically rebeling against itself. There was probably going to be some more intricate explanation, something that caused it. He became pretty much permanently bedridden, and needed a wheelchair to get around. So he was stuck in his home and employed a bunch of house staff to help him. Among them Maria, who was his chef. He was a bit smitten by her, and at one point before his death, kinda awkwardly asked if she would be willing to bear his child. She actually accepted, on the condition that they got married first so that she would have a family name. Raines protested since he didn’t know for how long he’d live, but in the end they did get married and Marie got pregnant. Raines was to die before the child was born, and the child would become either the parent of the creator of or the creator of (my notes are inconsistent) a reploid that was part of earlier mentioned sequel series.

Gary

Our crazy awesome badass vampire. I… didn’t have any plans for this guy either, really. Assumed dead after a fight with Haigos, lots his sword there, came back later. For Fortress.

His chapter was to be called Stand, and he was the other major character that was going to meet his final death there. Standing guard outside the fortress after the other primary players made their way in, guarding the entry from a massive army of mechaniloids and mavericks. At the end, well… that particular paragraph was actually written so just keep reading, but be sure that it was a fitting death for a nearly indestructible badass.

Mina

Mina, in my head, became the enigmatic deus ex machina, sort of. She was more of a concept. She was to outlive both her sons and have the time to give birth to a daughter, who’s the third of the trio of main characters in aforementioned sequel series. She was also essentially going to be the character to bridge Next Era with the new one, and her death was to be a very pivotal event in the backstory of that and pretty much a self-sacrifice.

Metro

I don’t even know.

Actually, an immediate-ish plan I had for Metro was that after Snex disappeared, most of Snex’s workload got pushed to him. He actually started rising through the ranks a bit and became a good friend of Atos. In Symphony he was going to sacrifice his ride chaser I forgot the name of in his battle that was never written. I think his eventual death was going to involve overloading himself bigtime and causing a pretty massive plasma burst.

Hailius

The only real plan I had for this guy was that 666 periodically returned to fight him. Even though Hailius implied at times that 666 was going to match him eventually, that never happened because 666’s death got in the way.

Morgan Lock, Lucy Woods & Simon Barker

Lock was the only one to enlist with the Maverickhunters after her conscription period ended. Lucy returned to her sports (with rumours of being involved in something else) and Simon ended up working as a bodyguard. Lock ended up becoming 666’s student, as mentioned, and ended up becoming a user of a pretty advanced grappling hook weapon system. Cigarettes was going to take place over the course of some time, and while Lock definitely became quite adept in close combat she didn’t survive the story. 666 never went to her funeral, but left his forehead protector in her casket before she was, well… shipped home.

Blues

Died.

Alia & Layer

Alia died. Layer became the head navigator and eventually got together with Zero.

There were going to be a chapter in Fortress called Response, which basically was going to run across all chapters – with everything told from the perspective of the navigators back at Maverickhunters HQ.

X & Zero

Fuck if I know.

Signas

Was to receive a combat body called the Omega Body that basically was going to make him really fucking strong. He was meant to be the one to defeat Sigma in Fortress, but 666 stole that kill. He was going to get a chapter in Fortress too, called Priority.

That’s everyone I wanted to say something about. Now? DOCUMENTS.

I’ve uploaded everything. Every story draft, every stupid document I found. I might have missed something, but it’s all under history. I haven’t edited anything, some of them I’ve barely even looked at between finding and uploading.

So let me say a few words about each new document. Anything I had in Evernote was exported as html documents because copying the text didn’t make it display correctly in OpenOffice. First, stories:

Bridge was a Shiva story I started writing. The big maverick talked about is Soldier Stonekong, and the bad guy was going to be Ride Boarski. That’s about all I can recall about that. It’s not very well written.

Cigarettes I spoke a bit about and yeah this is all that was ever written of it. 666 and Lock trains and works together, and the central thing is, well, the cigarettes. 666 was going to offer Lock one after every training session or mission or whatnot, and, well, only accept when she’s already dying. It’s not very well written.

Dance is an old as shit thing. I think both involved wants to forget it but that’s not how we do things here. Bonus notes in Swedish.

Expiry is the story of Pallette’s death, kind of. It tells the story of everything that led up to her death, and is told in reverse chronological order, starting with her death and then working backwards.

Fortress is the prologue to all the stories in Fortress.

Fortress Promise is the end of 666’s chapter.

Fortress Stand is the end of Gary’s chapter.

Mantis is the story of when 666 was forced to kill Emerald Mantis, for reasons.

Navigation is… actually, here’s the story of when Shiva and Pallette got together. With notes in Swedish, because at one point, this was supposed to become a comic. But things kinda ended before that. It’s a draft.

Passion is about a meeting of two characters. They’re not named in these parts that basically are the beginning and the end. See if you can guess who they are! (it’s not hard)

Student is the story coming before Cigarettes, of course. It’s just a page.

Symphony is actually here. Yep, you read that right. Since I’ve realized it’s never getting completed, I’m putting it up here. 13,467 words, 75,555 characters of pure unedited Symphony that hasn’t been touched in three years. At the bottom is an outline of how I had planned things to go, but there were changes. A few things were going to be rewritten – Kay was going to be in the desert after a helicopter crash, not a faulty motorcycle – and I’m not a fan of the opening parts. But, well, there you go, the closest you’ll ever come to reading the full story.

Tag was a story I don’t think I ever mentioned to anyone. It contains among other things the first mention of the Omega Body, as well as the actual return of Snow (remember her? Of course you don’t). Chronologically, it was going to be the first story after Shiva and Pallette got together. Also introduces a character called Bolt who I liked but never became a thing. Incidentally, he was going to be gay, which was going to basically be a thing that was true about his character and not be his character. Atlas and Talos were in my head part of a thing that was odd and I’m not going to say anything about, really.

Tribute was finally going to be that story, you know… if you remember that caption contest we had, the prize was going to be a cameo in a comic. Instead of a cameo, we decided to make that guy the villain. The comic was never made so I eventually started writing this, but obviously never finished it. Sad thing too. It was going to have Wheel Gator, Tunnel Rhino and Morph Moth combine into a giant mech and do a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann parody.

And then there’s the miscellaneous things:

Chronicles is first and foremost where I typed down some things for that sequel series I mentioned. Names and weapons and stuff of the three characters! At the bottom is some notes about, well… an imagined video game featuring these guys, which was to be a sequel to a game I imagined with the NE characters. In that first game, the four initial playable characters were going to be Silver, Snex, 666 and Shiva, and beating the game with them would unlock, respectively, Raines, Metro, Type and Gary. The names down there are the big bosses of the game: “Final Stage” is the final boss, 1 and 2 are bonus bosses that can only be unlocked with that character… and they’re all corrupted versions of the playables from the first game, except for Mina and Sigma. Archangel is 666, Blood Brothers are Raines & Gary (obviously), Marshal is Snex – also called “Fire Marshal” and now uses fire instead of plasma, and the only one who wasn’t corrupted in the same way as the others – Phoenix is Metro, Golden Melissa is of course Silver, Alpha is Type and Succubus is Shiva. Stupid? Why, of course.

Fortress Outline is just some planning for Fortress.

MMXNE is all in Swedish so sucks to be you if you’re not Swedish, I guess. Listing of the bosses in an imagined Mega Man X game where the bosses are our characters.

Navi was actually supposed to be a story, the story of when Cyber Peacock was defeated by Navis, but the story wasn’t actually written – just an appendix that explains the backstory of Net Navis as it relates to Next Era. Pallette was pretty much going to be the main character, and the person who suggested bringing in Navi enthusiasts (of which she is one) to try to deal with Peacock.

NE-College! is also Swedish. It’s us being silly and imagining out characters in a College AU. Thank god we never did anything with that.

Next Era IFAQ is a thing I planned on making a page on the site. It never happened.

Random was, well – it ended up being mostly about the Stardroids. It contains an excerpt of a story that was going to have X and Zero fight Pluto. There’s a line in Spear that refers to the Stardroids. Also a small part that is supposed to be Metro fighting Sunstar. Sunstar, incidentally, was going to be one of the most dangerous enemies any of our characters ever faced, given that his primary weapon was basically a wide disintegration ray.

And that’s it, really.

I might find more stuff. But this is all I have for now.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank everyone who was ever involved with Next Era. Silver, Flex, Lief, Metro, all of you and more people. Working with Next Era was really fun for me, and I firmly believe it made me a better writer. I have a new project now, a project of my own where – yes – working towards the ending is one of my primary motivations. Even if we don’t communicate much anymore (which we should, though! Add me on Skype or something, kennyman616), I still feel like I made some friends for life. Even if Next Era is getting laid to rest, I’m not done with you guys. And, of course, Next Era was what made me get the webhost. I still use kenny.next-era.net to upload things, and there’s been a bunch of more domains added to the hosting. My family, especially my brother, makes use of parts of it.

And to everyone who has read our stories, our comics, followed the website, anything at all: THANK YOU, it’s been an absolute blast. If ten, five, if even one person not part of the staff has read my Next Era stories and enjoyed them, well…

It’s been a long time since I could last make any significant update here. I posted those old story drafts and other documents, but that was really nothing more than digging through old stuff and showcasing them for your amusement.

Today, that changes.

For I have finished a story.

It’s not Symphony. But what it is has in about a month (I started writing it October 16th) become larger than what Symphony has become in all the years I have had it as a work in progress.

So it’s kind of a big deal for me.

It’s the first Next Era story I complete since 2007.

It’s the first Next Era story I write where 666 is not an involved character.

But most of all, it’s a sixteen thousand word testament to that my writer’s block is finally over.

I am working on a much, much shorter companion piece to it, but I’d want you to read that one later anyway, so it will be posted when it gets done.

A fun fact to note is that this story evolved from a particular scene that I thought of, and had boiling in my head for a while. In essence, it was the core of the story. In the completed story, that part amounted to only three thousand words.

And so, to this end, I present to you the first new Next Era story in two years: Archives.

Three miscellaneous documents:evolution666.doc was supposed to be the first in a series of articles, I had hoped for more people to write about their characters, but I never finished it and looking at it now I don’t really like how it was coming out. So I’m sharing it here instead.NE-Stats.xls (that’s right, a spreadsheet) was a thing that was done, trying to give the Next Era characters stats, using the Fallout stat system… because at the time I was playing a pen & paper RPG that used those stats. It didn’t work well when applied to these characters, so it was temporary amusement and then forgotten.Storys.xls was a listing of stories, and why or why not they were good candidates for being made into comics. And not much more.

Also, two story drafts:Christmas.doc didn’t actually have any name, but it was supposed to be a story of a Christmas party. Eventually, I came to dislike the idea, but some concepts in it aren’t terrible. Notably, the short segment at the end includes a mention of Pallette, who here has a vastly different characterization than I would later give her, and before I had the idea of making her and Shiva a couple, but I believe this is where I first came up with the idea of putting the two of them together in some way. This story in particular provides some support for the 666/Shiva pairing, but as I eventually decided for that pairing to never have been this strong, there’s little to nothing in this story that could be found canon. Well, maybe Shiva borrowing clothes from Silver.

Rank was a very early thing where I utterly wanted to write a story without 666. I had some initial ideas, and I knew how it would end, but I could never progress with it, so it died off. Bonus: Discussion about things related to the story by me and Silver. In Swedish.

Got one or two story drafts I’m not sure if I want to try to actually do something with. If I decide I’m not going to, I’ll upload them too.

WordPress now updated. I’m not a huge fan of the top bar I get when logged in.

Thing is, I was going through an old backup… and came across some stuffs.

Some old Next Era related things. From the time before it was even named Next Era, from the time we only called the entire project “Maverickhunters”. A bunch of documents. Documents, most of which were never released in any form. Documents that have in the past been seen by at most one other person.

Today, I’m releasing them. I’ve uploaded them all, here. You can browse and download what you want, or get them all in a compressed archive here.

They come in two folders, misc and stories. And now, I get to talk a bit about these documents!

misc holds… well, the documents that aren’t stories. Mostly related to 666.666.odt is a presentation of sorts I wrote about 666 once. Mainly, it’s a listing of his attacks. The attack listing is from a time when I was high on One Piece, many of the attacks having direct inspiration from there. Some of the attacks were kept, but most have been discarded completely. At the very least, most of the attack names have been discarded completely, as they suck.666boxlol.doc and Maverickhunters descript.doc are two variations on the same thing, the character presentation box that was used at the birth of Next Era back on Lunarstorm. The very earliest version is definitely gone for good, and that’s a good thing.Maverickhunters.doc is in Swedish. Sucks to be all one of you who read this page and don’t speak Swedish. It’s the introduction test from the same period as above, and even earlier. Questions written by Silver and Flex were sent to people who wanted to join. These are my answers.

stories is of course the meat of this update. It’s a folder full of discarded drafts for stories I was writing once upon a time, as well as a list. This is what they were.

Angels is just a few lines, I hardly even started writing it. It was supposed to be a story that was written by both me and Silver, in that we had already written the story by acting it out over MSN – it was a duel between 666 and Silver. 666 ultimately won, but not by much. It was in this story Raiden and the Venom Fuse were introduced, as well as the Razor Angel fusion. Is it still canon? Doubt it. Raiden was retconned out, so this story would have to be pretty massively modified, too. If I ever find the logs of that MSN conversation, as well as other MSN conversations we had, I’m uploading them.

Blade is 100% a One Piece inspired story. And by that, I mean 90% of it is ripped from the Alabasta arc. The title of the story is actually Routine, and was supposed to have sub-chapters, with the name of the opponent. The basic story was that 666 and Silver were going on a mission, which turned out to be a trap. Silver was captured, 666 battled five guys, and then ran into a trap himself. The opponent in this piece of the story had a diamond coating, but could control the form of the coal, so it could turn into graphite too… whatever that was good for. (amusingly enough, just last year I reached the part in One Piece where there is a character who can turn his body into diamond… and he blocked a sword slash from the greatest swordsman in the world with that.) The entire secquence is almost identical to the Zoro vs. Mr 1 battle, and Soul Dance is a carbon copy of Zoro’s Lion Song. The Soul Dance was preserved for later use, and I believe was first ever actually shown in Love. Canon? Maybe parts of it, but definitely not as it was written here.

Executioners is a massive wreck and display of something that should never have been written. Since there’s talk of “entertaining” kills and the such, this one is very, very likely to have been majorly inspired by me playing Manhunt. I just wanted to write a story in which my characters kills hundreds of people. Since enough of it wasn’t written to explain the backstory, let me specify that this actually isn’t just a random killing spree, but the “town” is a prison, and the “citizens” are all criminals that were going to be executed anyway. So they hired people to kill them for entertainment. While technically something that could happen because they’re hired mercenaries, I’m going to go ahead and utterly un-canonize this.

Instinct was an early thing I worked on after Raines and Gary had been introduced, because I needed to get Gary and 666 together for a battle. The tournament idea is taken from Dragon Ball, and I had many ideas for this story that just didn’t pan out. The ending of the story is written, but there’s a large chunk of story missing in the middle, and it’s not written well at all. But it’s ten pages. Well, nine and a half. That’s right. Nine and a half pages discarded. It kind of pains me, but on rereading I’m kinda glad I dropped it. Definitely not canon. Particularly not the part where 666’s claws are detached. They can be shut off so they can’t be activated, but they’re not removeable.

Time was supposed to be the formal introduction of the Order of the Pentagram and its members, and the story of that one year 666 was away from the Maverickhunters. A mission in Norway. The story of when Razie died, and stuff. Note that I already back at this point had Shiva’s nickname for 666 decided, and she’d stick with “sixboy” for the rest of forever. One of the few stories I wrote in first person, and I believe Hate is the only one I ever wrote like that that ended up being released to the world. This one is technically canon, in that the one year did happen, the mission in Norway did happen, and it was there Razie died. What this was going to become, had I written it to the end at the time, would probably not be the way it happened, though. The campaign probably didn’t take a year, but I assume 666 spent some time after it on his own before returning.

Maverickhunter tales is just a list of stories I planned to write. Time started being written, as you saw above, but of the ones in the list the only one I remember anything about is Prison. It was going to be a story about 666 spending some time in prison at the headquarters, for… some reason, and Silver pretty much being the only one who were visiting him.

Meeting isn’t new. It’s the original version of the story, that was written like complete crap, before I replaced it with the version that didn’t have grammar with MPD. Here for your reading displeasure.

So that’s some history, and some stuff you almost were subjected to. Enjoy.

And it’s not the greatest pleasure, because it’s been two years, and you know what that means – that’s right, it’s time to cough up the cash to keep this site afloat for another two years. So, that’s $190.80, to be paid… well, as soon as possible.

As the hosting is being used for other things, we’re not going to take the full force of this, though. I’m going to have my brother pay at least half of that, since he’s the other one using the hosting the most, but that still leaves $95.40 for us to take care of. And this is right after I spent the extra money I had, and I have no real income at the moment. Fun times! Well, there’s three of us, so that’d be $32 each. That’s what I’m counting on. At least the dollar is pretty cheap at the moment, $32 is JUST above 200 SEK. Actually, since it’s not EXACTLY $32 each, but rather a smidgen below, a nice round 200 SEK each covers our half. It actually covers it EXACTLY, as that adds up to $95.40! Well, at current exchange rates, and there’s minor fluctuations day-to-day. But still.

And of course, donations are always welcome. The Paypal button is right there.

Yes, few of you know this, but I have been working on the Next Era game! It will be freely available on this very website when it’s is complete. It will be an action/adventure game, somewhat in the vein of Metroid, with nonlinear exploration and several different areas to visit. Features include:

– Play as one of six different characters with very different playstyles: Silver, Snex, 666, Shiva, Metro or Type!
– A whole new original Next Era story arc!
– Eight main maverick bosses to fight, and over 20 different enemy types!
– Very smooth keyboard and mouse controls!
– Play up to six players together on a local network or over the internet!
– Helpful advice from the three Navigators!
– Excellent isometric pixel graphics!
– A final battle with a well-known enemy!
– A number of secrets to uncover!
– And many more surprises!

I do not wish to release any screenshots yet, as the game is still in an unfinished testing state, and any screenshots would not accurately reflect the final product. As I have a lot more school work at this moment, I cannot promise any release dates, but I might have a beta out before summer. A lot of the groundwork is done, the engine is up and running, and I’m not making the graphics by myself, but many things still need to be mapped, and the bosses still require a lot of scripting to work properly.

But I felt it was high time to come with an update about something, and as this is the only really so far not publically announced project I’ve been working on, aside from some stories I haven’t mentioned yet…

Stay tuned, as there will be more updates, and eventually, screenshots. Development is slow right now, mainly due to school – but give me a few months…